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It's Not Your Imagination: Fast Food Is Getting Slower

Drive through customers wait in line at a Chick-fil-A in Forth Worth, TX. A new survey found the chain has the longest drive-through lines of the top fast-food brands. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Ever felt like you could read a novel while you waited for your fast-food order in the drive-through lane? It may seem like eternity, but the average drive-through order does take roughly three minutes to get into your hands these days, a new Drive-Thru Performance Study from industry trade magazine QSR and Insula Research shows.

The study looked at a half-dozen of the top drive-through sellers — Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonald'sMcDonald's, Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, and Chattanooga-based southeast fave Krystal. (They also rotate in one additional chain each year — this time, Taco John’s.) Testers visited more than 1,600 restaurants and evaluated their performance.

The general consensus: Delivery times are longer than ever. McDonald’s, for instance, posted its slowest average time in the study’s 15-year history at nearly 190 seconds.

Where will you wait the longest? That’d be Krystal with nearly a 218-second wait, followed by Chick-fil-A with 204 seconds.

By contrast, speediest chain Wendy’s only makes you wait an average of 134 seconds, more than a full minute less.

Why is service getting slower? Here are four reasons:

More complicated menus. Go back even 15 years, and most fast-food menus were primarily burgers and fries. Simple to pre-cook, toss into a bag and hand over. Now, McDonald’s and its competitors offer a range of salads that come with separate packs of dressing, croutons and other add-ons. For its part, Taco Bell sells burrito bowls with 10 different ingredients, QSR notes. It all adds up to more prep time.

Busier drive-through windows. You may wait longer simply because you’re in a long line of cars, especially at drive-through leader Chick-fil-A, where an average of more than six cars are lined up during peak lunch and dinner times. McDonald’s had the next-busiest drive-through lines with more than three cars on average.

More up-sells. Fast-food workers are under increasing pressure to get you to add items to your order, so there’s more time spent asking if you want fries with that.

Bigger orders. Some chains including Krystal are pushing big orders such as 24-packs of hamburgers. If someone in front of you orders one of those, it’s going to be a while.

Finally, let’s get to the other important drive-through question: How likely is it your order will be wrong? Bad news — you’ve got more than a 1-in-10 chance of mistakes.

On average, only 87.2 percent of drive-through orders were accurate, the survey found. Accuracy has been fairly steady through the years. Despite high-tech efforts including the addition of electronic read-back features at many chains that show you a write-up of your order after you place it, mistakes still happen.

Only Chick-fil-A and Taco Bell had more than 90 percent accuracy in the QSR survey. The chain with the most mistakes was Krystal with under 80 percent accuracy, followed by Burger King with 82 percent accuracy.

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Order accuracy problems are the result of the complicated menu. No amount of technology can compensate for the blizzard of decisions quick service workers have to make to get customers the right drink or the asked for sauce.

True enough. Even going slower, as they do now with the more complicated menu, the error rate hasn’t improved. What’s really funny is the electronic readback doesn’t seem to have moved the needle! You’d think if patrons are seeing their order written out with their own eyes they could catch entry errors. Of course, nothing the customer can do about orders getting misread on the other end.